When you report symptoms of depression and anxiety, the doctors give you a chart to fill out. Rating on a scale of frequency, it asks questions like how often you feel like you’d be better off dead, or take little interest in doing things. Though I caved to trying psychiatric medications years ago, they still […]
Category: Psychology and mental illness
Art Worth Making
“Don’t use your memoir to air old grievances and to settle old scores; get rid of that anger somewhere else. The memoirs that we do remember from the 1990s are the ones that were written with love and forgiveness…although the childhoods they describe were painful, the writers are as hard on their younger selves as […]
Living with Existential Depression
People have been asking how I’m doing, and I answer that it’s all the same as it was months ago. I’m still fighting the monster of depression, I’m still trying to find meds that work for me, I’m still struggling to find my way back to my art. There’s not much to report when it […]
Winter Freeze
“When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of the imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal […]
The Devastation of Lost Faith
“I lay in a bed of resistance Chained to either side I really wish I could, reset, rewind Someone has clawed out my eyes I don’t know what they told you But this place is not what you think Living inside a hole, they put me underground Where they could never find me unless they […]
Dear Anxiety
“Trapped in a cold white room I want to know, who’ll be there when you snuff the wick? I won’t reflect the same as you I want the proof you’ll promise to let ’em down quick. I never want to see clear at all There’s nothing that could be there now Pull out your teeth […]
When God Spoke to Me
“Descartes invoked God – in this case, a literal deus ex machina – to save himself…When people run up against something inexplicable, transcendent, and, most of all, ineffable, they often call it ‘God,’ as if that were some sort of explanation.” –Barbara Ehrenreich “If you withhold information from your children because you would rather them […]
Cultivating Intelligent Disobedience
“Loyal dogs, unfailing tool They do what they have been trained to With the eidolons, the minds are full The evil ghosts of old The evil ghosts of old Insanity turns back at last As soon as their food is done And dog will raven dog The claws crush bones, the claws crush bones Claws […]
What Happened
Content warnings: gaslighting, child abuse, mental illness, suicide, eating disorders, poverty Now is as good a time as any to explain why exactly my blog was so choppy over the past four years. I don’t trust people like I used to. I don’t believe the world is full of sunshine and roses, like my parents […]
Depression Meals and Food Recovery
Content warning: eating disorders, food trauma, depression The subject of nutritional abuse is one that I’ve found difficult to talk about for a long time. I keep thinking that it’s because I’m no nutritionist, and I’m not really qualified, but this fear masks avoidance. The thing is, I don’t always know when I’m hungry, because […]